How to lead team meetings

Most professionals are (or will be) responsible for leading team meetings at some point in their career. Using leadership, control and empathy skills (while keeping things professional) is essential for controlling meetings.

However, having the right ideas and theories helps controlling things when (and if) the meeting looks like it’s getting off course or if parallel arguments start to derail the point of the meeting.

If you have experience managing and delegating tasks you’re most likely the best candidate to step forward and manage team meetings.

How to properly lead team meetings?

Your job leading team meetings begins way before the actual team meeting. To begin with you need to keep track of all the topics you need to approach during the meeting.

Doing this is a lot easier if you use some sort of management software (such a Pipefy).

Keeping track of the topics is important not only for planning how much time you’ll have for each topic but also for letting all the participants know the topics in advance so they can prepare for the meeting.

It’s also your job to keep track of the meeting’s participants. Send them an invite (via google calendar, for example) so they’re aware of the time and date of the meeting and inform you whether they’ll be able to join (or not).

Planning in advance is important not only for the person responsible for leading it but for everyone involved.

During weekly task report meetings, for example, ask each of your team members to write down a list of all the tasks they completed during the week to keep the meeting organized and make sure you won’t forget anything.

It’s very important to make this a rule: ask people to provide notes about what they want to discuss so that you have enough material to prepare beforehand and keep everyone else on the loop (even those that for some reason couldn’t make it to the meeting).

These info are essential for drafting the meeting’s minutes to send all the participants after the meeting is over.

Another essential task management skill that’ll help leading team meetings is knowing how to prioritize the topics. Meetings normally happen during a defined period of time so even if all the proposed topics seem relevant you’ll need to sort through them to define which (and how many) you’ll be able to approach during this meeting.

As you can see, more than half of your job as a meeting leader happens before the actual meeting. While planning and defining the meeting’s priorities it’s important that you inform any of your team members whose participation will play an essential part in the meeting so they can plan what they’ll say in advance.

Free team task management template

Pipefy is a powerful tool that allows you to keep track of all your team’s tasks. With Pipefy’s free task management template you’re able to manage all your team’s tasks, prioritizing and keeping track of what each of your team members is doing.

With Pipefy’s reports feature you can set weekly reports so you can keep track of what your team members did during a specific period of time without having to manually update it every time.

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